> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld
Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper.
Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness.
Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please.
Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars.
What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.
The thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way.
Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done.
I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.
Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.
Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.
On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.
There's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer.
These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.
And all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.
> has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use
TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.
That figure includes every single government-owned street, AFAIK. Total infrastructure costs are higher but don't seem that much higher than in Germany?
My instinct would have been that this applies to Python! I'm only working from an anecdotal dataset of 1, a friend who works in insurance and is becoming necessarily more and more familiar with Python for data processing.
> The glass bin we have in Amsterdam isn't one that you can even push broken glass into if you wanted - it's shaped specifically to receive bottles.
It wouldn't take large shards of a plate window but it definitely can accept anything with one dimension that doesn't exceed 10cm or so, which is almost all the broken glass we've wanted to put into it.
So is all this data scraped by creating fake frequent flyer accounts and then making new ones as each one gets banned by the airline? Doesn't seem sustainable in the long term. As soon as it starts to meaningfully impact their ability to do whatever value maximization they have in mind, they are going to clamp down on this activity, right? They could require you to have some actual mileage activity before you can do searches, for example.
